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I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with Eleazar Eskin (Department of Computer Science) at UCLA. I am holding Collaboratory Fellowship from Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCB).

My research focuses on developing bioinformatics methods to leverage large-scale high-throughput genomics datasets to better understand the biology of disease. My flagship product is Read Origin Protocol (ROP), a tool for discovering the source of all RNA-Seq reads originated from complex RNA molecules recombined T and B cell receptors and microbial communities. ROP was applied across 1 trillion reads across 10641 samples. I am also interested in bioinformatics education and pedagogy. I am leading an undergraduate research group, focused on genomic research. My philosophy on how to engage undergraduates in genomic research is presented here.

December 18, 2018.New preprint!! Our preprint about shortcomings in microbial databases is live! We show that the overlap of fungal species is alarmingly small (<2%). Work led by a team of talented undergrads — Caitlin Loeffler and Aaron Karlsberg. This is a collaboration with David Koslicki. The preprint is available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/17/497867

December 6, 2018. New preprint! Our preprint about bioinformatics training to boost research capacities in resource-limited regions is live! This is a collaboration with Ben Langmead, Javier Sanchez Galan, Ian Toma, Pavel Pevzner. The preprint is available at https://peerj.com/preprints/27415/?td=tw

October 25, 2018. New preprint! Our preprint about software crisis in computational biology is live! We have performed a review of usability and archival stability of published omics tools and resources. We have found that 28% of the tools are impossible to install.

The preprint is available at https://doi.org/10.1101/452532, The preprint was ranked #22 among 40,000 bioRxiv.org preprints according to Altmetric Attention Score

September 11, 2018. News! Slides from my highlight talk about the origin of 1 trillion RNA-Seq reads across diverse adult human tissues at ECCB 2018 are available here.

August 8, 2018. My learning materials “Introduction to UNIX command line” have been chosen for inclusion in a NIBLSE Learning Resource Incubator. The incubator will bring together a small group of teaching and disciplinary experts to customize the materials so that they are accessible to a different audience, teaching setting, or course context.

July 8, 2018. News! Slides from my talk at ISMB 2018 Education about involving undergraduates in genomics research are online [pdf]

May 10, 2018: New paper! Our paper about increased blood microbial diversity in schizophrenia is published in Translational Psychiatry [paper] [preprint]

New paper! Our paper about involving undergraduates in genomics research to narrow the education-research gap was published in Nature Biotechnology [preprint] [paper] [catalog of resources]

News! Slides from my talk at NGS2018 are available here. The talk was selected as the best oral presentation [Twitter]

New paper! The Read Origin Protocol published in Genome Biology. We created easy to use package (https://github.com/smangul1/rop) for those who want to dive into dumpsters of unmapped reads. ROP was applied across 1 trillion reads from 10641 samples [paper]

New preprint! Our preprint about a novel method to profile viral and fungal organism in metagenomics samples is online at bioRxiv [preprint]

New release! New release of ROP (v1.0.7) is available here. ROP now accepts a mixture of mapped and unmapped reads (in bam file) to profile immune repertoires. We have added ggprofilePlus.py to randomly assign multi-mapped reads into genomic categories considering estimated gene expression levels.

New software! We released UMI-Reducer : a computational method allowing to differentiate PCR duplicates from biological duplicates based on the UMIs (U nique Molecular Identifiers). This is a collaboration with Kelsey Martin Lab. Details about the tool are available in biorxiv preprint

New release! New release of ROP (v1.0.6) is available here.We have switched from IgBLAST to ImReP to profile B and T cell receptor repertoires. ImReP shows superior accuracy compared to existing tools (see our manuscript “Profiling adaptive immune repertoires across multiple human tissues by RNA Sequencing” available at bioRxiv).

New release! New release of ImReP (v0.3) is available here. The various options have been added. A detailed tutorial is available here. Toy example with simulated receptor-derived reads is now distributed with the tool.

News! Slides from my talk at PSB 2017 workshop on Open Data for Discovery Science are online.

New release! New release of ImReP (v0.2) is available here. A detailed tutorial is available here.

New software! We released ImReP : a novel computational method for rapid and accurate profiling of the adaptive immune repertoire from regular RNA-Seq data. ImReP is able to quantify individual immune responses based on a recombination landscape of genes encoding B and T cell receptors.

New preprint! Our paper about immune repertoires profiling from RNA-Seq across 53 various GTEx tissues is online at bioRxiv [preprint] [software]

New release! New release of the ROP (v 1.0.5) is available here. Thanks to contributions from Jeremy Rotman, Benjamin Statz, William Van Der Wey, Kevin Wesel at Bruins-In-Genomics (B.I.G.) Summer Program . Special thanks for Linus Chen and Kevin Hsieh for improving the code and developing ROP-mouse.

New release! New release of ROP (v 1.0.4) is available here. Now we accept more formats (.fastq, bam, fasta, fastq.gz). ROP now is using a custom script to identify low-quality reads.

Journal Club! I am leading the Journal Club about the interactions of the microbiome and immune system. We will be discussing how to study the interactions of the microbiome and immune system and how both are affected by genetics. Also, we will be discussing the methods devoted to studying the immune system and microbiome. More details here.

New release! New release of the ROP (v 1.0.3) is available here. It includes new options and improvements. The list of the tools, parameters and reference databases used by the ROP is now saved to a log file. More details here.

New release! New release of the ROP (v 1.0.2) is available here. ROP 1.0.2 is a maintenance release with the minor changes.

New release! New release of the ROP (v 1.0.1) is available here. The functionality to run the targeted analysis for your samples been added. For example you can run antibody profiling for your data skipping all other steps. The current release also allows ROP to accept the input (unmapped reads) in the .bam and .fastq.gz formats